By: I.M. Windee

So the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals, in an opinion issued by both Clinton and George H.W. Bush appointees, has determined, to little shock if not agreement by all, that there are constitutional issues with the ObamaCare mandates.

Much has been and will be said about the argument of whether the highly elastic interpretative approach in the last several decades of the commerce clause gives congress the power to impose its edicts for people to affirmatively act in a certain way. As someone who believes the constitution affords no more power to any branch of federal government than what it explicitly states and the rest should be sorted out at the ballot box, I take great comfort in having former Chief Justice John Marshall in my corner.
Liberals, who advocate that a vaporous and expansive constitutional “penumbra” zone exists which allows whatever their agenda seeks, will have to hope that the spirit of the Warren   Court will rule the day when ObamaCare goes before the high court sometime next year. But seemingly overlooked, aside from the commerce clause and state’s rights arguments, is the vaunted Liberals’ right to privacy.

By way of jurisprudence history, in 1965, an individual named Griswold challenged a Connecticut law which made it a criminal offense for a married couple to buy contraceptives. In the case of Griswold v. Connecticut, the Supreme Court struck down this Connecticut law, holding that the Constitution actually created substantive rights which were so “fundamental to the principles of liberty” that they could not be restricted by government. There is no explicit mention of privacy in the U.S. Constitution but that creative and industrious Court declared that the other rights in the Constitution contained a “penumbra” of implied rights, and the general right to privacy was determined to be one of these rights.

As predicted at the time of the Griswold ruling, abortion would boomerang very quickly behind as a case of whether such right existed, and it did. In Roe v. Wade in 1973, the Supreme Court further extended such privacy right to create a limited right to have an abortion.

Almost 4 decades of intellectual and unintellectual debate have since occurred over that decision, but it still exists as the “law of
the land.”

So, at the risk of using Liberals arguments against them, if the “right to privacy” exists on whether or not to have a child, doesn’t such right exist on whether or not to have medical insurance?

ObamaCare would prove its worth just to see Liberals argue against themselves on this.

This entry was posted on Sunday, August 14th, 2011 at 3:12 pm and is filed under Ruminations. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.